PARIS.- GALLERIA CONTINUA is presenting, in its Paris Marais space, Ivresse d’une vie de bains de mer, a solo exhibition by the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade. The show highlights his multidisciplinary approach, bringing together film, photography, installation, and silkscreen, alongside poems by the artist, presented for the first time as part of an exhibition.

Presenting recent and newly produced works, de Andrade first developed this body of work through a commission from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, where it was presented in November 2025 within the Photography Department. In this series, the photographic image undergoes a process of translation into silkscreen, shifting from a representational device to a structural component of the image, while becoming the artist’s preferred medium.

Within this perspective, the exhibition unfolds through a dual framework. Combining the lived experience of Brazilian seafaring communities with the artist’s process of reinterpretation, a sensory environment emerges, shaped by rhythm, movement, light, and chromatic intensity. Rooted in his native context, the artist’s practice is characterised by a socially engaged approach, addressing the cultural realities of northeastern Brazil.

The images are produced among communities of sailors and fishermen along the coast of Maceió, his hometown, and the São Francisco River, in the region of Alagoas, where he lives and works. Drawing on the practices of jangadeiros and canoeiros, two groups of seafarers, de Andrade develops a pictorial vocabulary that transforms the textures and colours of sails, water, and bodies into abstract compositions.

The legacy of 1960s Neoconcretism, and in particular the influence of Hélio Oiticica, forms a central point of reference in these works, drawing on a practice in which popular design, abstraction, and rhythm intersect. Taking distance from the universal, disembodied language grounded in geometric purity of Suprematism and Concrete Art, Neoconcretism introduced a sensorial and experiential shift, reconfiguring the artwork as a situated and relational field. Here, the body, time, and lived experience become central to the activation of the work, opening it to a more participatory and socially resonant dimension.





De Andrade’s inspiration is also rooted in the movement’s predecessors, particularly in Kazimir Malevich’s use of colour and form in the coloured squares series, which he directly references in these recent works.

This attention to material and gesture is further reflected in the artist’s process, as the screen-printing technique is carried out manually by the artist in his studio. This approach extends across a range of supports, including Brazilian sucupira wood, a native species. The return to manual printing echoes the sailors’ own practice of hand-painting their boats on wooden surfaces, sustaining a visual and material language in which reproduction, materiality, and gesture are in continuous dialogue.

Expanding this sensorial dimension, the title Ivresse d’une vie de bains de mer, drawn from one of the artist’s poems, evokes the intense and immersive atmosphere of canoeist communities, where sailing becomes a perceptual condition, imbued with a hypnotic sense and shaped by heat, sunlight, and the movement of the waves.

At the centre of this research lies the film Jangadeiros e Canoeiros (2025), which fluidly blends documentary and fiction. In the film, Jonathas de Andrade weaves together the everyday lives and environments of two distinct yet interconnected contexts, proposing a narrative built on their relationship to colour and form: the jangadeiros, from the sea along the coast of Maceió, and the canoeiros from the São Francisco River, in a more inland region shaped by the challenging drought landscapes of the northeastern sertão.

Through an interview, canoeists articulate the chromatic and symbolic codes that inform the painting of their boats. Colours drawn from the natural environment carry cultural, emotional, and traditional meanings, ranging from the greens and blues of water and sea to deeper reds associated with mortality. The film captures recurring gestures, sun-exposed bodies, moments of physical intensity, and collective experiences during regattas.

These dynamics extend into the exhibition space, where large, vividly coloured sails, marked by time, exposure, and use, are dispersed like boats in a regatta. Originally at the heart of the photographic commission, the series of black-and-white portraits reveals the faces of members of the two communities, intertwined with materials sourced from their own environments.

The hand-painted sails, bearing slogans from local businesses or advertising images, are reclaimed, isolated, and reframed by the artist, becoming the primary support for the Jangadeiro Sails works. Mounted on a special stretcher, the reading of the advertising message is partially broken apart, leaving behind more abstract pictorial information. This practice relates the work both to appropriation and the logic of the readymade.

These recycled fabrics may be folded and contained behind the frame or allowed to extend beyond its edges, cascading onto the floor. The resulting sculptural presence situates the works at the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture, forming layered compositions in which image, meaning, and memory converge.

Within this visual language, a reference emerges to one of Hélio Oiticica’s most iconic bodies of work, the Parangolés: capes worn by participants in dance, inspired by the marginalised cultures of the favelas. These cloak-like garments were made from recycled materials and incorporated political or poetic texts, photographs, and painted imagery. Conceived as geometric structures, they were activated through participatory performances, affirming a form of abstraction grounded in lived experience and social engagement.

The diptychs from the series Permanent lightning strike, in which the artist applies the printing process to the panels of sucupira wood, are accompanied by poems by the artist. The images from the film, rendered in black and white, capture the physical intensity and labour of arms and feet at the moment the boats are pushed into and pulled out of the sea.

The artworks are accompanied by poems by the artist, presented here for the first time, which extend the narrative by weaving together moments of collective experience and translating into verse the intensity of the vibrant atmosphere that runs through this ambience.

This investigation culminates in a further formal synthesis: colour fields gain volume, forms are synthesised into geometry, and the square sail emerges as both a structural and symbolic motif. In the series Neoconcrete Canoeists, Jonathas de Andrade combines black-and-white silkscreen photography with contrasting chromatic fields, transforming them into scenes of sailing. A direct reference emerges to Hélio Oiticica’s Metaesquemas, a series in which geometric forms are set into dynamic tension, loosening the rigidity of modernist abstraction and introducing rhythm and perceptual instability.

Engaging with this broader legacy, Jonathas de Andrade extends these explorations of form and perception through a practice attentive to the temporal, sensory, and social dimensions of experience. Abstraction thus becomes a space of encounter, where meaning emerges through the interplay of image, gesture, and viewer.

Jonathas de Andrade is a visual artist born in Maceió and based in Recife who works with film, photography, and installation. His films are often developed through collaborations with communities, creating performative narratives that move between fiction and documentary.

His interest in combining fiction and reality results in allegorical constructions that question issues of gender, class, and race embedded in Brazilian sociocultural structures, as well as the contradictions produced by its colonial past.

Among his recent exhibitions and projects are a commissioned project for the Victoria and Albert Museum, a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume (2025), the solo exhibition Permanência Relâmpago at Galeria Nara Roesler (2025), and a commissioned project for the Vatican presented at Conciliazione5 and at the MACRO – Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (2025).

Jonathas de Andrade represented Brazil at the 59th Venice Biennale and has participated in major international exhibitions such as the 13th Sharjah Biennial, the 32nd São Paulo Biennial, the 16th Istanbul Biennial, and the New Museum Triennial.

His work is held in major collections including the Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofía, Museum of Modern Art, MoMA, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Tate Modern.